The Great Iberian Road Trip, Days 29 TO 31: Night Swimming, Cafés And Dolphins

One of the most important weapons parents have in the battle to keep the peace is The Veiled Threat. In these enlightened times, we no longer resort to the menace of an outstretched palm across the skin or much worse, as I myself also experienced. Our punishment of choice is the child’s elimination from an exciting activity. Works quite effectively for a little while, but then when they think they’ve escaped they get naughty again. I don’t take any prisoners – all my kids have experienced the shame of not going to a party or on a trip.

So when we arrived in the small fishing town of Sardiñeiro near Finisterre on Friday evening, we made for the beach before it was too dark. It had been a lovely day, but we had been stuck in the car for a lot of it having travelled from San Cibrao via A Coruña, so we wanted to at least make the most of our evening.

But it was really just beginning.

We quickly changed into our swimming gear and headed for the sea. Now… I’ve been in the Baltic, the North Sea and the English Channel, but nothing comes close to an Atlantic dip. In fact, after the Mediterranean, I would say the Baltic Sea was the second warmest. I jumped in at Faaborg in September 2020 and it was like having a bath compared to the Atlantic. It was a bit of a struggle to maintain composure for too long, but I got my whole body under after a few random screeches and squeals, much to the amusement of a local lady perched on her portable sunbed, reading a railway station thriller.

A perfectly orchestrated way of getting young children to comply is to Open A Door, rather than force them to do stuff. So in order to get off the beach, there is a very handy restaurant and café just next to the showers. A nice pineapple juice and an evening snack was gratefully received.

The next morning, after a restless time trying to get them to settle, they were all acting a little ratty and irritated. We spent the morning at home recuperating (we all had an inexplicable fatigue that kept us from going far), but once our stomachs were starting to rumble, we made for Fisterra, the last town before North America. It was a delightful resort with a decent selection of places to eat, albeit at medium-to-expensive price ranges, but as we don’t want to break the budget, we settled on something cheap.

It was about a quarter to four, and we wanted a dessert. The guy running the restaurant pointed us to a place just two doors up – the name was Batidor (Whisk), and it was run by a Hungarian family that had made the Santiago pilgrimage a few times and loved it here, so decided to settle. They had been open just a year, but it was already a famous place in the town. It’s not hard to see why: their Grand Café-style cakes were beyond phenomenal, so elegantly made and delivered to perfection. And their coffee was extraordinary… a proper Central European brew. But the atmosphere was very laid back and it was very clear they loved what they did. So did we.

But the rattiness was becoming a bit of an issue, so we didn’t stay long. We drove to the end of the land to see the famous Finisterre lighthouse, do some walking (always a struggle), and make some memories. Then at about six, we wanted to go to the beach again. It had started to cloud over, but Dainoris was determined to get his swimming costume on. How do you tell a five-year-old that he can’t go to the beach? You tell him it’s too cold and he won’t enjoy it. Then when he kicks up a fuss, you let him experience it. Works very well – slowly, each time you hit a conflict like this and you are proven right, the more they will trust your call, or at least follow your decision. At least, that’s the theory…

So when we drove back to the centre, people were leaving the beach in their droves. Dainoris and Livia got their costumes on, Milda sceptically followed. They reached the water’s edge, dipped one toe in and came straight back. “Yes, it’s a little cold,” said Dainoris with a matter-of-fact look on his face. I hadn’t changed into my swimming stuff, because I was sure I wouldn’t entertain the idea of getting in. I put my toe in and let’s just say the only thing I experienced that was colder than that water was the greeting I got from a girlfriend’s mother the day she met me. That was in Łódź way back in 1994. That’s another epic story…

So we quickly got off the beach and had a little walk back to the car. A little earlier, I mentioned the Veiled Threat. How did I manage to curtail the bad mood and ill feeling between the siblings? Earlier on, I had managed to procure tickets for a boat trip out into the sea and around the breathtaking bay. Nobody wanted to be the person who lost out on that trip; Dainoris had been asking for weeks, but until we got to Fisterra, I hadn’t come across any proper boat excursions. Well, this was about to change.

On Sunday 28 July, we all got up at a leisurely time, which in this house is when the hour hand is still on the lower half of the clock. Breakfast was easy, getting ready was a cinch. It was a pure delight to experience that feeling when nobody was getting on anyone’s nerves… it made a real change. I wonder what could have caused all this niceness to suddenly happen – oh yes, a boat trip!

Arriving in the port, we had a little time to kill, so we went for a short walk – cue the usual groans, albeit quickly quelled with a little appropriate comment. Dainoris kept asking if the boat was far still, but it didn’t go on as heavily as before.

We boarded the boat a little after 12.15, departure at 12.30. The ticket seller was a jolly woman, and the two men who ran the boat were excellent communicators. All-in-all, it made for a splendid boat trip. The children couldn’t contain their excitement, wanting simultaneously to be looking out from the upper deck to sitting at the back dipping their hands in the water. The boat passed Finisterre lighthouse, which we had seen the day before, and then entered much deeper waters.

At one point, the captain switched off the engine and the traditional music that they insisted on inflicting on us, and waited for a few minutes. Suddenly, there was a splash in the water nearby and an almighty gasp from some other passengers. It was a family of dolphins, athletically flitting under the keel, swerving around the stern and darting off into the watery depths. What a moment for us. If I were to see dolphins every day, I would never get tired of it.

The motor kicked back in, as did the inescapable music, and we continued on our trip round the bay. The view of the distant mountains, a green so dark it was almost black, in front of them lower rounder peaks, and between them and the sea a gentle slope down to the numerous towns and villages dotted around the edge of the water.

When we reached the harbour once more, I felt a deep satisfaction that is hard to describe, but I think one of those mental resets took place in me. The feeling of having been through a huge toxic build-up had now sunk back into its evil little nest and started biding its time before the next round of nastiness. But for now, I was feeling cleansed and full of energy.

I had booked for us to go to a restaurant opposite the boat’s moorings, and we went to eat. Bonny Bee and I decided for the first time in a long time to actually eat a fish dish. The kids settled for their usual fried orange rubbish, except Livia, who saw the opportunity to eat spaghetti Bolognese, her default meal.

We sensed a wave of drowsiness coming over the three of them and thought it was a good opportunity to take them home and give them a good rest. In the meantime, with the kids out of action, my excitement levels built up – I could actually spend some time just for me! I decided to go straight in the sea. Across the road and slightly to the left is another absolute beauty of a beach. Crescent-shaped, fairly wide, shallow waters, nearly no waves. What wasn’t to like…?

A couple of hours later, I headed back. Livia and Dainoris felt like going in the sea. So I took them to the other beach in Sardiñeiro where we went on our first day here. Milda was keen to stay on the sofa. Livia and Dainoris have a rather strained relationship, mainly due to Milda’s attachment to her brother, so this was a good moment for me to try to forge some new bonds between these two.

Because her siblings have this powerful relationship, and also because of her own character, Livia is quite a loner. So on the beach, she approached the nearest group of kids and insinuated her way into playing with them. Sometimes the kids let her in, sometimes they find her weird and keep trying to move away. This time, the group of boys found her to be an object of fun, with a little malice. She didn’t get it, but she knew something wasn’t right. Intervening, it soon became clear they were bemused by her witterings in English and once I explained it to them, they were fine. They still didn’t play too much with her, so I played the monster in the water. I found some seaweed and pretended to attack Dainoris and Livia with it, which lasted long into the evening.

The sun was setting, and we (especially I) had built up quite an appetite. Despite the afternoon’s meal, which wasn’t that heavy to be fair, we settled on egg and chips in the restaurant next to the beach. Then with heavy stomachs, heavier muscles and even heavier eyes, we headed back to our cramped little apartment up the hill.

All three fell asleep almost instantaneously after a quick nighttime snack and the usual bathroom routine. I was still bouncing though, so in the dead of night, I headed to a cove just five minutes from us, and took a midnight skinny dip. While I was in the soothing, warm water, I saw two shooting stars. I swam round to the beach the other side of the rocks, touched the sand and swam back.

Feeling alive is one of the main factors that has been absent the last few years. One of the main reasons for my continual state of feeling life is passing me by is that, like Livia, I have very few friends. In fact, once the children came, I hardly saw anyone any more. And visitors got put off either by the perpetual neediness of the kids or my levels of stress while trying to juggle everything at the same time as well as my own self-control. I have continually been a nomad in social circles. And so I have done my best to enjoy life despite the obvious blank spaces in my list of acquaintances. I know I’m a difficult person to be around for more than a couple of hours, but the revolving doors of friends have never stopped turning. I guess it’s me.

So I enjoy my own company.

In any case, this was a very special full day, and one that will live long in the memory. On the way back to the apartment from the beach, I met a senior lady in her front yard. I asked her what the huge concrete sheds on stilts were. At first, I suspected apiaries because of their small gaps. Definitely not dovecotes, anyhow. Not even a sparrow could fit through those slits. She surprised me by saying that they were to store maize. But then it kind of made sense. She said down in the village of Carnota was a really big one, the largest in the area. Well, I thought, now I know what we’re doing tomorrow!

And so, after a vegetarian lunch of pasta with carrots, onions and cherry tomatoes in a red sauce, we headed south to Carnota, passing some of the most stunning scenery I have ever seen. There are areas of the world where you can look at a photo and almost pinpoint where it is. But there is so much of everything in Galicia, it would be virtually impossible. I could show photos where you would think you were on the Amalfi coast, or Koh Samui, or Lofoten, or western Ireland, or Garda and Como, or the Yorkshire Dales, or the Massif Central, or the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, or the Białowieża forest of eastern Poland, or Brittany, or even the Caribbean. It’s everything all in one area.

We arrived in Carnota, a pretty quiet place in the middle of nowhere on the way to somewhere else. We were looking for a place to have dessert but the only place open had just croissants. As I reached the crossroads in the centre of the village, I saw a sign saying “Carnota Beach”, so I thought we’d give it a try. Driving between houses barely wide enough for a car to go through, round labyrinthine streets carved out from the pre-motor vehicle era, we reached a fairly straight piece of road. At the end of it was this hostelry under the trees. It looked so inviting. And indeed it was. And they had some delicious desserts!

But the biggest surprise was yet to happen – further down this seemingly deserted track was a huge car park and a wooden walkway over some dunes and a river to Carnota Beach. Just when you thought you had seen it all, you step through the gap in the dunes and you are confronted with an endless semicircle of sand stretching in both directions as far as you could see. The backdrop, some impressive mountains, once again convinced me that we would be returning to Galicia many more times in the future.

The children couldn’t get into their swimming gear fast enough. We spent the rest of the afternoon there under a clement sun dodging the waves and making more memories. On the way back, I stopped to buy a few provisions – despite being in the shop a good twenty-five minutes, nobody felt like leaving the car.

Three more days and then we head to the next destination.

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